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ZorbaTHut  1d ago (text post)   1317 thread views

Site Backend Changes

Hey there! For complicated reasons, some of which I will explain later, I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase. Right now, this means "fix a bunch of small bugs". Later, other things will be happening.

The immediate goal of this is not to massively transform the site or do a Digg v4/New Reddit thing. Frankly, if the site remained exactly the same (but with fewer bugs) I would be happy.

The long-term goal isn't going to be quite that static, though. The long-term goal is to set things up to allow more subcommunities, similar to how subreddits work. This will be a larger set of changes. These changes will not obsolete The Motte itself; I am absolutely aiming for a site that can comfortably keep holding The Motte. I've talked about this before if you want to go read about it - this is still the same plan, for what it's worth, it's just now being (slowly) executed.

I will be posting more, and asking questions about next steps, when actual site behavioral changes are in the queue. This just isn't that! This is infrastructure work.

 

tl;dr: The site backend may be a little wonky for a bit, sorry about that, please report any bugs.

(and mods, feel free to unsticky this in a few days if I forget)

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I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase

Don't tell me you're rewriting it in Rust?

I am, in fact, rewriting it in Rust :V

(Eventually. Right now I'm just doing a cleanup.)

I am, in fact, rewriting it in Rust :V

Are you sure this doesn't go in the CW thread?

Remind me, what is it that makes people consider Rust "captured"? Do they have some sort of control over who can legally compile with it, or something?

The Rust community is very left-leaning. You know the Scott Alexander post where he talks about how his workplace had "resist Trump" posters but would never tolerate removing them or putting up "support Trump" posters? That's basically what the Rust community is like. If you wish to participate (and are conservative at all), you have to accept that you will have to tolerate people going off occasionally about how trans women are women (or something similar), and you will have to hide your power level. If you try to say "hey, we should focus on programming and not politics", you will get shouted down with "technology is inherently political", and if you try to actually make conservative political arguments you will quickly become persona non grata. I don't know why the community is like that, but that is why the language has a reputation. I just use it and don't engage with the (imo extremely toxic) community.

Remind me, what is it that makes people consider Rust "captured"?

Mostly how they call everyone they disagree with a Nazi.

Unfortunately, a lot of this goes around lately, and now it's in tech too. People seriously calling others Nazi for using a wrong Linux distro or a wrong window manager. I guess whichever tiny bits of virtue signaling still left unharvested must be harvested.

I was just poking fun since I get the sense that there's a lot of drama around Rust adoption that coincidentally lines up with some CW lines. Mostly I was thinking of the enforced guardrails that thrownaway24e89172 mentioned. I think your reply that guardrails have legitimate use is fine, but in practice more than a few Rust developers run into the guardrails, decide that expression is important, and wrap what they want to do in unsafe, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Rust is a language of authoritarian safetyists. It attempts to prevent you from writing "bad" code by design, because it believes that "safety" is supreme over expression.

Those used to be called B&D languages.

Last time I checked nothing stops you from enclosing all of your code in the unsafe tags.

Sure, and likewise nothing stops women from learning math in an environment constantly telling them "girls are bad at math".

Surely there's a type I/type II error dichotomy there, where you know you have some chance of accidentally writing something unintended (e.g. "goto fail"), and so there's a legitimate tradeoff between protecting you from those (which is serving your intended expression) vs. stopping you from doing things you actually intended? It seems reasonable to have various options in that regard lying around - even leaving aside personal differences, there are task differences in which is more important.

Unless it stops you from writing politically "bad" code? Does it stop you from naming variables "nigger" or something?

The exact placement of the boundary between "legitimate tradeoffs" and "unreasonable restrictions" is the root of most culture war issues. From a cultural perspective, rust exists in the "sacrifice expressivity for safety" camp which is why it is considered "captured".

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. There is a legitimate tradeoff for the programmer when deciding which language to use. It is sensible for people to pick one for some things, and another for others - and for this division to differ between people. A restriction one imposes on oneself cannot be unreasonable.

If there were some movement to arrest everyone who didn't program in Rust, that would be insane (within organisations gets more complicated; there are moral hazard issues), but @ZorbaTHut does not appear to have been ordered by anyone to use Rust.

Right, but your question was why the language was considered "captured", and it is considered captured because of its association with a culture of authoritarian safetyism. Individual usage is mostly irrelevant to that cultural impression.

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